Gabriela Amaral: 0:00

So when I do serve the customers, I made sure that I am listening and getting feedback for from the entire customer journey. And then working with the internal areas like sales logistics, customer service to make sure that we're improving the service that we provide to our customers.

Rick Denton: 0:25

You're listening to CX Passport, the show about creating great customer experiences with a dash of travel talk. Each episode we’ll talk with our guests about great CX, travel...and just like the best journeys, explore new directions we never anticipated. I'm your host Rick Denton. I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport. Let's get going. For those of you who enjoy an adult beverage Are you familiar with Stella Artois? Budweiser Modelo, Skol. Those are just a few of the brands under a brand you may not know as well. AB InBev. Beyond beer, this beverage company through its global subsidiaries provide some of the most famous brands and beverages to consumers worldwide. If you've had ever had anything to drink, adult or otherwise, you've likely enjoyed a brand from this company. So what would it mean to drive customer experience for something so incredibly visible? Think about this title, Global Customer Satisfaction manager. Today's guest Gabriella Amaral is exactly that the global customer satisfaction manager for AB InBev. In her current role, Gabriela helps build digital and physical customer experiences through human centered research and design. Did you notice something there? That blend of digital and physical Gabriela started her career coming out of university graduating with a degree in computer science with a master's in human computer interaction. Whoa, that is way smarter than my political science degree. I'm really curious to know how Gabriella started there. And then grew to her current role driving customer experience globally, for some of the world's most well known brands. Now, as I record this episode, it is a chilly February in the depths of winter. Yes, I'm in Texas, which isn't the same as Tallinn, Estonia. But it's still cold to me. And so today's guest gets to make me a little bit jealous as we head south of the equator to Brazil there. It's not jackets and gloves. It's short sleeves and swimsuits. So join me with both a great discussion around customer experience. And a vicarious warm up as we talk with Gabriella Gabriella. Welcome to CX passport.

Gabriela Amaral: 2:50

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here today representing Brazil and talking a little bit about customer satisfaction in ABI.

Rick Denton: 2:58

It's going to be fantastic. And yes, I am jealous that you're representing Brazil. What a great place to be representing. Yeah, let's start with that thing that I mentioned in the intro right? I'm really intrigued overall by this wide variety of paths that people take to get into and then leave the customer experience world. And yours started in tech, graduating with a degree in computer science. So I'm very curious walk me through that journey from tech to leading customer experience AB InBev

Gabriela Amaral: 3:29

Yeah, it's a very like curious journey. I started my career as a technology trainee at Toros for those who don't know, Taurus is a software management company based in Brazil. And in the program that I joined the company I was lucky and had the opportunity to choose the area that I want to work. And since my background is in tech and my master's in human computer interaction, the dream for me was to work with tech and user experience or tech and customer experience. And I had this opportunity there in the customer experience area, they had an open position for a product manager of a customer experience, product digital product. So I chose to go to the customer experience area and I was a product manager there for this customer experience internal product use it by the interior areas for some time. And then I joined on Bev the business unit that is based in Brazil, like you know, ABI is a global company. In Bombay, we call the company on both. So I joined on Bev Suplee, a very similar role that I had at Taurus, and they're my director notice that I also had some custom experience to average knowledge and invite me to go to the business side of customer experience and not focus on the on the product. So since Since then I am helping a BI to build our customer experience Sverige. And as I mentioned, I started in Brazil. And then in June of last year, I was invited to go to this global role, where I helped now not only Brazil, but all the other markets to derive our customer satisfaction. What

Rick Denton: 5:22

a great journey. I really do enjoy hearing guests and hearing how they got there. Because it's not, there's so few paths that are the exact same. And now I know to call it Avi right. I just got to I get to little insider code here. And now I am able to speak the insider lingo. And I know that when you and I had talked earlier, when I was thinking about consumers of ABI beverages, I was think about me as the consumer. Yeah, my experience is open bottle, pour, drink, enjoy drink. But while that's true, and it is I am a consumer, and Avi views me as a customer, I really wasn't thinking of the b2b space, the bartenders, the restaurants the club's, tell me about how your role focuses on creating great customer experience for those customers.

Gabriela Amaral: 6:09

Yeah, yeah, my scope, as discuss Mr. section leader, is to provide the best customer experience for our b2b customers. We also have services and focus on b2c, the consumers, but my role is focused on the b2b side, and we have like three main focus on is to listen to our customers. So we do a lot of surveys, focus groups, with these bars, restaurants, grocery stores, to listen to them, and understand how their experience was, is and also to improve their customer journey. And when I talk about customer journey, he starts with these bars, registering in our app, and then purchasing foreigners making orders, they usually do it weekly, or bi weekly basis, and then receiving the delivery of our products that they bought. And if they have any issues, they can also contact our customer service. So when I do surveys of customers, I made sure that I am listening and getting feedback for from the entire customer journey. And then working with the internal areas like sales, logistics, customer service, to make sure that we're improving the service that we provide to our customers, and making sure that we're doing our deliveries on time delivering our products. And also thinking about how we can combine physical and digital, right. You mentioned this in the beginning of the podcast. So something interesting to share is that some years ago, this customer journey was totally offline was sort of based on a physical vizury of our business representant. So customers could only buy from us if someone visited their store physically. And today, we evolved this customer journey and customers can buy in the app the piece. So they can buy from us from anywhere, anytime. And they also have a lot of new benefits like our our loyalty program, everything that they buy from us they gain points. And then they can exchange points by products, by trade marketing materials for the stores, things like that. Yeah. And also, we are working to digitalize our customer service. In many countries, the service is still based on phone calls. But inside the app, we are creating chat, and customers also can open their tickets in the app. And we use the help center in like consuming articles and yeah, self service information that's available there. And another challenge in this journey was like another focus that you have is to transform our culture, right? We are a company very focused on results. And we need to make sure that the results that you deliver for the business are also aligned with the service that you provide to our customers. So it was like a big challenge to transform the culture of a company that's so big.

Your CX Passport Captain: 9:25

This is your captain speaking. I want to thank you for listening to CX Passport today. We’ve now reached our cruising altitude so I’ll turn that seatbelt sign off. <ding> While you’re getting comfortable, hit that Follow or Subscribe button in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. I’d love it if you’d tell a friend about CX Passport and leave a review so that others can discover the show as well. Now, sit back and enjoy the rest of the episode.

Rick Denton: 9:51

There are so many things that you just said that I want to ask you more about may have to do a double episode we'll see this there's the The idea of let's start with one area there. And it's the idea of the digital tools. And I'm going to ask you about that human and digital element of it a little later. But I'm thinking specifically of your be to be customers, your bartenders, your your clubs, your restaurants, your, I guess, you know, stores, right? I can actually see where the the, the digital component is, let's imagine a busy bar or something along those lines, where there's not a lot of time to stop down and take a make a phone call. When y'all were going about developing those digital tools, how did you listen to the bars, the bars, the restaurants, the the clubs? How did you get the input from them to know this is what they're going to want? This is how we're going to deliver something that that customer the b2b customer needs, how Don't you listen to them?

Gabriela Amaral: 10:52

Yeah, the main way that we have to listen to our customers today is through the NPS survey. So we have monthly NPS surveys that are sent to our customers. Of course, they have currently enrolls and follow the the recommended method knowledge. But we have a monthly survey results that we run globally for all markets. So I have like global NPS results and also results by market. And in the way that we conduct this survey. We know what are the main reasons for promoters and also the main reasons for detectors and perceives, so we have like a Pareto of problems, and also operator of things that customers are happy for us. And for those like reasons that customers are not happy. And we have two ways of solving the problem. One is like using this information as an input, to prioritize our product backlog, our app backlog, and also to work with the internal areas of the company to make sure that we have projects to solve the root cause of the problems. Because the problem sometimes are related to the other times they are more related to recall problems like logistics, for example.

Rick Denton: 12:14

Right? What? You know what fascinates me about what you just said? There's there's a lot of times that there'll be a discussion. Okay, so I understand that we do customer experience for b2c. But how do we do customer experience for b2b? Well, the exact same way? It's a little different flavors. But what did you do you just described, you listen to your customer, and then you act upon what you hear. And I enjoyed getting that that b2b perspective. I've enjoyed getting that from other guests as well, when it's you, we realize at the end of the day, all of these bees on both sides of b2b are just humans and humans have the same desires, wishes and dreams and want to be listened to and then acted upon what you hear. You said something else. And that I told you, there were several things that you'd already given me that I'm like, oh, gosh, I want to pull it that thread. And you talked about listening globally, and even how you evolved from your Brazil role to a global role that is giving you this exposure to this wide set of countries that are beyond the borders of Brazil. So how do you listen? How do you understand and then create these great experiences for a customer base? That is across international borders?

Gabriela Amaral: 13:24

Yeah, that's a very good question. And also a big challenge. Yeah, when you like when you are in a country, your view is limited to that like place. And when you move to a global position, this movement that I did, you can compare countries, but in a way that you have to be clear that each country has different levels of maturity. Right? So the same things that I asked for Brazil, maybe I cannot ask for South Africa, for example, because we are in different levels of maturity when you talk about customer satisfaction. So what we do, for example, when you measure NPS, and when you set targets, we understand that we have different baselines, right? So let's say for example, for a country, the focus will be to solve the basics to make sure that we are delivering everything that we're selling in other countries, maybe what we are now second level where we can optimize the current processes, review business rules, because the basics are already solved. Any other countries they are like providing a very great service level or and we can already think about who experienced so what do we have like a very great view of each level of maturity that each country is and then we work with them specifically on actual plants that make sense for their current scenario. So basically that, yeah,

Rick Denton: 15:03

the the idea of the different maturity levels, that was something that I hadn't anticipated you bring into that. But that makes a lot of sense that Heck, I've talked about it with guests from around the globe as well, in the sense that, you know, there are different levels of placement along the customer experience journey as different countries have gotten focused on it versus other countries versus other regions. And using that to apply how a global company like ABI focuses on those areas. So that okay, we know that we've got to triple down on just the basics in this area. But over here, we've got a real chance to innovate and let that innovation trickle as it goes through some of the other regions. That That makes a lot of sense to me. Now. I can't wait much longer, I have to stop down and do a little bit of customer experience talk. because Brazil is a country that fascinates me, I've only had one chance, and I'm sad. It's only one chance to have been there. And it was way back in 1998 when I was working for a client for all of six weeks. But I'll tell you, those six weeks were in January and February. So I love sending emails back to my friends here and talking about how I was sunburned on the beach on the weekend while they were in the middle of a snowstorm. But I loved it. It was great food, great culture, great people. Now you come from a region and I'm going to try to get this right but you come from a region, monster ice. That is the home of one of my favorite Brazilian treats,Pão de queijo talk a little bit about what it's like there. What do you want people to know about Brazil?

Gabriela Amaral: 16:34

Yeah, so in Brazil, I mentioned some things that I would say but one point is that we are very welcome people so we really like to receive for rangers and also like receive friends at home. We like to socialize a lot. And especially in my state to have a lot of bars. So one thing that we do is go to bars and have drinks together. And also we have great food in my state in Brazil. One food that's very popular is cheese. Who it is yeah, if you have a chance to visit Brazil and also Minais Gerais you should try cheese and also bread cheese in English it's like Pão de queijo in Brazil but cheese bred

Rick Denton: 17:36

Gabriella little change of pace here now for me a flight. So from the Dallas Fort Worth region, I don't think a lot of folks really realize this. It's actually further for me to get to a city like Sao Paulo than it is London, I was really surprised to know that it was a longer flight from DFW to Sao Paulo than it was DFW to London. And so if I were to come to Brazil, and I'm sure any of your travels as you go around to all of the regions that you have responsibility for, sometimes travel can wear you out and it's nice to hit the lounge and so we're gonna hit the lounge now I want you to join me in the first class lounge we'll move quickly and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Gabriela Amaral: 18:16

It's Hawaii. Yeah, so since I'm from Brazil, I really like beach and this like summer weather. And Hawaii was always a dream place to visit it. I had this chance when I did my exchange program in the US back in 2015. So some years ago Yeah, but I really enjoy it and it is a really special place

Rick Denton: 18:44

Hawaii is is a beautiful place I've only been there once it's a it's not a short flight for me either. And I I can see coming from a culture like yours that enjoying beach and a destination makes a lot of sense as well. What is thinking of the future? What is a dream travel location that you've not been to yet?

Gabriela Amaral: 19:02

Yeah, so there are so many countries in Europe that I have not been yet like London for example, that I would love to visit and I also know that there is this young woman when am I in customer experience community there and I adore to visit them in person right now I just interact with them online.

Rick Denton: 19:24

Hey, we may have to find a way to tag them and get them to watch this episode and hey, you need to get Gabriella there in person not just watch. Get it Get a flight for her to go enjoy London to one of the great cities in the world. Absolutely. Now, I've got to imagine this is a hard question to answer for someone from a culture that is so food oriented as yours but what is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Gabriela Amaral: 19:46

Meat I love a great steak.

Rick Denton: 19:51

Oh there's nothing quite like a great steak. And again if I slaughter the pronunciation forgive me but the churrascaria is from Brazil are some of the best things that I've eaten Here's one of my favorite exports from Brazil into the US or the abundance of churrascaria is that exist? Give me a good steak and I'm with you there. What is the thing your parents forced you to eat, but you hate it as a kid.

Gabriela Amaral: 20:16

Probably some vegetables in Brazil have a variety of vegetables. Some of them I like some of them not much.

Rick Denton: 20:25

Give vegetables on this show a lot. I think some of us have grown into enjoying the vegetables, but there's still something about the non vegetable that we'd rather have than the vegetable. So now, let's think about that travel again, what is one travel item, not including your phone or your passport, that you will not leave home without

Gabriela Amaral: 20:44

probably my card or my wallet

Rick Denton: 20:54

Gabrielle, I love the practical element of Yeah, if I'm going to travel, I need my card. I've actually said that when the family is in the midst of packing, and we're stressed about packing. And I remind not only my family but myself that if I've forgotten anything, the only actual fundamentals that I need are my passport, and a credit card. So as long as I've got my passport, and the ability to pay for something that I forgot, we don't need to worry about the packing stress. So I love the practical nature of that answer. Let's talk about something that you said in that question. Again, another thread that I wanted to pull out, you talked about how ABI is a business results oriented company and let's be honest, many companies. That's why they're in business, right to create business results. And I fundamentally believe that customer experiences is a way to create those business results. But it takes a bit of a culture reorientation to a company like that. How, how have you done that? You mentioned driving that forward, but how were you that driver to create this customer oriented culture that ABI, especially when it's something that's so business result focused?

Gabriela Amaral: 21:59

Yeah. So when we decided to focus on customer experience, we started measuring NPS because we're really focused on data. And we needed to understand the stage that we are and like the journey that you need to follow. And we also noticed that if we started talking about NPS, with our employees, they did not even know what is this metric, and why why we're measuring it, why this is a focus now. So we we understood that you need like to make clear, for all employees, that customer experience is a focus. And we are like now we have to work not only on sales results, but also how we are providing the service that we're providing to our customers. And when we had the high leadership align about that, we created our strategy, it was basically a lot of things not very, but a lot of initially. So we train the whole company, all levels of the company in areas for them to understand the need this new phase of the company. And we also create Ambassadors Program, CX Ambassadors Program, okay, yeah, which has two main goals. One was to have, like other people in other areas of the company, multiplying the customer experience, knowledge in the area and representing customers. And we also another goal of this program, was to make sure that we had other employees of the company working on projects to improve customer experience, like projects or being short term results.

Rick Denton: 23:51

The the two things in there, the whole thing really captured me, but the two things that I really loved, and there were the ambassadors, I think that's such a great idea. And I would be intrigued to to even know more about that. And then the idea of, hey, let's get other people involved in the customer. So it's not just this little Customer Experience team doing it by themselves, but rather, an entire opportunity for folks outside of that team to be able to do something in the customer experience base is sort of a prove it by doing it. And I've seen great success, I can see how that would move the culture forward in a results oriented company. Let's go back to your customer experience, origins and tech. And it too is related to something that she'd said at the beginning as well. And that is that human that digital with your origin and text with tech and your evolution into digital, there's times that I think we may have over indexed on the digital side of things, especially through the pandemic and the like it was important but I think we've over indexed it's important to keep that human in CX so how do you go about blending, both that digital and the human in customer experience in your A world.

Gabriela Amaral: 25:00

Yeah. So one way is combining, working together for the technology, right? So there's the customer satisfaction team, listen to the customers get all this feedback. And then we connect to the app team to make sure that the backlog of the product is being prioritized accordingly to what you add value to our customers. This is one way. Another way is when you we work with the areas of the company may have the solutions to solve the customer's problem, their technology related. So let's say we order to give good visibility for our customers of the orders that are that they bind yet, we need behind that technology for the delivery team. We also need technology for managing the products, the stock that we have in our company, so many of the solutions to the customer problems. They have a technology project related to it. And me, this background makes everything easier because I can navigate in both business and tech side of this project.

Rick Denton: 26:17

That does that absolutely helps. Gabriella, I joke with people that I mentioned my poli sci major. So clearly you were running laps around me from a difficulty perspective with your major major. But my first job taught this poli sci major how to code. And I didn't do much coding before, it was incredibly helpful to have that digital exposure, though, so that I could understand that in the context of business in the context of humanity and you bring those two worlds together, I can see how that'd be valuable. I'm going to close out with a wider view. So not an AVI view, but customer experience. It's not a new idea. In Brazil, it's kind of a culture that's focused on experience a former CX passport guest Laise Pôrto, she talked about how the Brazilian experience the culture is just all about experience. You even describe it when you're describing sort of the vibrancy of what folks do for for fun. And in their free time. It's at the core. And so given your experience, given your role now, how are you helping grow the overall Brazilian customer experience focused culture for the future?

Gabriela Amaral: 27:22

Yeah. So in addition to work at ABI, I do a lot of projects related to customer experience. I have a mentoring program called CX leader, where I help other companies and also other individual people to to like, with the challenges in customer experience. And I also have a new online course it is available and you purchase the course to help people to build their areas, CX area from zero, and create a strategy and a plan to implement because we experienced incompetence.

Rick Denton: 28:03

That's awesome. I actually, I did not know that, that you had that course out there. So when we talk afterwards, I'll get like the link to that. So for any of you out there who actually sadly, I only know like yeah, Bhongir I don't know a lot of Portuguese, but if you know Portuguese and want to learn customer experience, I'll get a link to that down in the show notes there so that you can get access to that. And I love how you're mentoring the next generation of customer experience leaders, right, those of us that have gone before helping helping those pull those that are new in their journey forward. Gabriela I've enjoyed talking with you today. And I imagine there's others that would want to know a little bit more about your approach to customer experience, abi and now this course is well if folks wanted to get in touch with you, how can they connect and learn more?

Gabriela Amaral: 28:45

Yeah, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find me as Gabriela Amaral. And also in my Instagram account, which is gabrielaamaral.cxt the CXT from customer experience and technology.

Rick Denton: 29:02

All right, well, I will listeners as always, it's download shownotes scroll down. It'll be right down there for you to have a look at and click and get to know more about customer experience in Brazil through Gabriella Gabriella, thank you so much for talking with me today. I've learned a ton as always, I've become jealous because of thinking about Brazil and how wonderful it is there. And you've given me inspiration to head back to Brazil again. I really appreciate you talking with me on CX passport today. Thank you so much.

Gabriela Amaral: 29:31

Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here representing Brazil. I hope you all have the chance to visit the country sometime.

Rick Denton: 29:42

Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. Make sure to visit our website cxpassport.com where you can hit subscribe so you'll never miss a show. While you're at it, you can check out the rest of the EX4CX website. If you're looking to get real about customer experience, EX4CX is available to help you increase revenue by starting to listen to your customers and create great experiences for every customer every time. Thanks for listening to CX Passport and be sure to tune in for our next episode. Until next time, I'm Rick Denton, and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.